Brainstorm with me about brainstorming

August 11, 2007 2:09 PM

How do you boost the effectiveness and productivity of a graphics-heavy brainstorming session?

I'm facilitating a brainstorming session on the user interface of a web site. I've led brainstorming sessions before and I'm familiar with managing the "criticism-free environment" and recording ideas.

How do I translate that exercise to a design-oriented session?

I plan to start by listing attributes the participants like and dislike about web sites, but I imagine we'll soon get beyond text descriptions and have to start drawing.

Any suggestions or experiences in capturing and categorizing the design concepts and ideas - good or bad - will be helpful as I think this through.

For what it's worth, we will have at least one graphic designer and one web architect/specifications expert present.

posted by redarmycomrade to media & arts (9 comments total)

Whiteboard and digital camera?
posted by mrbugsentry at 2:30 PM on August 11, 2007

Lots of pads of paper you can pass around.
posted by devilsbrigade at 2:47 PM on August 11, 2007

Make the participants break their ideas down into very basic, simple language. Don't let them cover blurry concepts with big syllables.

Make sure the purposes of the design are clear. By starting from the same point, the solutions will be more focused and easier to evaluate.

Make sure they don't leave the session without defined next steps and deadlines.

Having no tangible product (no matter how big or small) is the biggest mistake out of brainstorming sessions.
posted by yoga at 3:02 PM on August 11, 2007

I use sticky pads a lot for this. The description is necessarily kept short and to the point, and they can be moved around for re/categorization as needed. Also, if you get into screen design, you can make a mock screen on a white board or easel pad and use the notes to play with different placement of design elements.

I agree with yoga that the purpose of the design needs to be clear. Before you get to the level "Let's put some links over here" you need to have clarified the user goal enough to say "We need a way on this page for the user to get definitions about the options they have."
posted by cocoagirl at 3:14 PM on August 11, 2007

I use sticky pads a lot for this.

Poster-sized sticky pads are much better than whiteboards for brainstorming sessions.
posted by b1tr0t at 3:26 PM on August 11, 2007

Some great advice here. I'll add that you should discuss Use Cases. Too many of these sessions focus only on aesthetics and vague goals. But you can get things nailed down by posing some concrete scenarios, like "what would a user have to do to change his password?" or "what would a user have to do to update his order?" How intuitive would completing these actions be? How many clicks would they take? If the user screws up, how easy will it be for him to understand his mistake and correct it?
posted by grumblebee at 3:31 PM on August 11, 2007

yoga's points are spot-on for _how_ to manage the session. I've found both the whiteboard/digital camera and PostIt pad approaches to work pretty well.

The main thing, overall, with those approaches is just to make sure you don't have any "resource constraints":
- Make sure that you've got plenty of markers, in a bunch of different colors, of the right kind.
- If you're using whiteboards, try to make sure you're in a room with a _lot_ of whiteboards, not just one, and a digital camera with a lot of storage space available.
- If you're using the big sticky pads, then make sure you've got a bunch of pads, a bunch of easels, and a lot of wallspace that you can slap the sheets onto as they fill up.

As a general rule, though, I also prefer the big sticky pads to whiteboards, since it creates an automatic, permanent record as you go along. I can't how many meetings I've left with a bunch of those big sheets rolled up in a big wad, and then used them to make sure we've got a detailed record of what we talked about. I've even dug one of them up, weeks later, after I've gotten into some kind of debate about what we "decided".

The best answer, sometimes, is a hybrid. I've run meetings where the whiteboard is the "ideation" space, to kick around ideas, but the sticky pads are the "decision" spaces. You slap up one sticky sheet for "Design Ideas", one for "Next Steps", etc. While you're brainstorming, you use the whiteboard to kick ideas around, but set a rule that "if it's not on one of the sticky sheets, it doesn't count." That makes it a conscious decision to transcribe things to the permanent record, and encourages people to be careful about how it's described there.
posted by LairBob at 3:51 PM on August 11, 2007

I just ordered this book, by Bill Buxton, a Senior Researcher at Microsoft (and an awesome guy): Sketching User Experiences
posted by zpousman at 8:42 PM on August 11, 2007

Another step that will help in recording the iterations of ideas is to
use the digital camera to take photos of any graphic collages or whiteboard drawings that you make. That way, if something gets erased or rearranged, you have a record of it. This is also a nice way to disseminate the visual to the group later on.

I agree that Use Cases are an excellent tool, not only for kicking off the brainstorming, but for testing new ideas as they arise.

There are poster-sized post-it pads as well as post-its that come in a variety of shapes/sizes/colors that are useful in tracking specific types of visual information during brainstorming.
posted by jeanmari at 10:42 AM on August 12, 2007